John's Vademecum

Try to learn something about everything, and everything about something -Thomas Huxley “Darwin's bulldog” (1824-1895)

User Tools

Site Tools


public:radio:2025:allstar_expands

This is an old revision of the document!


2025 Radio Topics

Allstar Expands

Digging Deeper into Allstar

I've seen a few examples of small networks and am interested in building up a larger system.

Some examples that interested me:

Adding more nodes

It's possible to have up to 10 individual Node IDs with a single Allstar node number, by using NNX to add a 6th digit to the base node number…

My Base Number is 48148 and I activated the NNX feature and created 3 nodes

  • 481480
  • 481481
  • 481482

Since they are all behind a NAT firewall, sharing one public IP address the nodes must use different UDP ports. To make this possible I created 2 new Server instances on the Allstar Portal, one per node, and chose the UDP ports :

https://www.allstarlink.org/portal/servers.php

  • node481480UDP 4569
  • node481481UDP 4570
  • node481482UDP 4571

The choice of which server is used per node is chosen on the Node configuration page for each node, on the Allstar Portal

https://www.allstarlink.org/portal/nodes.php

Then I flashed new SD cards for the new nodes using the ASL 2.0.0 Beta 6 image I've used for the initial VHF Gateway node.

https://github.com/AllStarLink/ASL-Live-Build/releases/download/2.0.0-beta.6/asl-2.0.0-beta.6-kc1kcc-20210324-raspberrypi-armhf.img.zip

The config. for the original node had to be changed, to reflect the new node number 481480 versus 48148 which means editing (at least)

  • /etc/asterisk/rpt.conf
  • /etc/asterisk/iax.conf
  • /etc/asterisk.extensions.conf

To ensure each internal LAN node can find each other (can't rely on Allstar's DNS) it's necessary to add each one to the [nodes] stanza in each node's config file /etc/asterisk/rpt.conf using the appropriate IP and UDP port depending on which node is being configured.

; from the VHF Gateway node 481480
[nodes]
481480 = radio@127.0.0.1:4569/481480,NONE      

481481 = radio@192.168.21.250:4570/481481,NONE  

481482 = radio@192.168.21.251:4571/481482,NONE

I added the DVSwitch bridging to the hub node 481481 which is configured as radioless, I made a local/private node on that machine 1399 for this purpose.

All 3 nodes have supermon and this needed some configuration to make sure the Asterisk Manager ports were available on their external interfaces bindaddr = 0.0.0.0 and not just on the loopback bindaddr = 127.0.0.1

/etc/asterisk/manager.conf

;
; Asterisk Call Management support
;

; By default asterisk will listen on localhost only.
[general]
enabled = yes
port = 5038
bindaddr = 0.0.0.0

[admin]
secret = YOUR_MANAGER_PASSWORD
read = all,system,call,log,verbose,command,agent,user,config
write = all,system,call,log,verbose,command,agent,user,config

Port Forwarding

My ADSL router has the following port forwards to allow external incoming connections to be set up

  • UDP 4569192.168.21.109 for the VHF Gateway / Echolink node
  • UDP 4570192.168.21.250 for the DMR Bridge node
  • UDP 4571192.168.21.251 for the Test Node
  • UDP 5198-5199192.168.21.109 for Echolink client connections
  • TCP 42110192.168.21.109 for the VHF Gateway/Echolink node's Dashboard
  • TCP 42111192.168.21.250 for the DMR Bridge node's Dashboard
  • TCP 42112192.168.21.252 for the Test node's Dashboard

To allow the node numbers to be resolved to useful names the script astdb.php should run nightly to maintain a lookup table. The image installed several copies of astdb.php in different places, all updating a central data file /var/log/asterisk/astdb.txt. To allow for the private node numbers to appear as useful information, rather than not in database you put the information in a file privatenodes.txt

1399|GM4SLV|Bridge to DMR|TGIF TG2354429

and the astdb.php script must know where to find it. The easiest way is to run the astdb.php from the directory containing privatenodes.txt

and the copy in /var/www/html/supermon/ is used, privatenodes.txt resides here too. To automate the process the update is done nightly via /etc/cron.daily/allstar_helpers which now contains to point to the correct version of astdb.php

#!/bin/bash

# Get new allmon data daily
/var/www/html/supermon/astdb.php

VHF Gateway

Platform Raspberry Pi 2 Model B Rev 1.1
InterfaceCM108 Soundcard - modified
RadioFT-1500M @ 5W
Frequency144.9125MHz
Allstar Node 481480
Dashboard http://gm4slv.plus.com:42110/

The initial node, described here : GM4SLV Allstar 2025 got too cumbersome adding DMR Bridging, along with handling Echolink.

I decided, since I had a few spare Raspberry Pi boards doing nothing much, to split the DMR Bridging to a separate node.

I removed the DVSwitch bridging from the VHF Gateway node.

/etc/asterisk/rpt.conf

/etc/asterisk/iax.conf

/etc/asterisk/extensions.conf

/etc/asterisk/modules.conf (noload echolink)

/var/www/html/supermon/allmon.ini

Hub with DMR Bridging

Platform Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2
Allstar Node 481481
Dashboard http://gm4slv.plus.com:42111/

This one is for linking the others together, and running DVSwitch to bridge to (at the moment) TGIF TG2354429 (my ID Talkgroup)

I added the DVSwitch software, in the same way described here GM4SLV Allstar 2025 and decided to bridge to TGIF instead of Brandmeister.

/etc/asterisk/rpt.conf

I also decided to use the md380_emu emulator for the AMBE transcoding.

/opt/MMDVM_Bridge/MMDVM_Bridge.ini

/opt/Analog_Bridge/Analog_Bridge.ini

/etc/asterisk/extensions.conf

/etc/asterisk/iax.conf

FIXME

Test Node

Platform Raspberry Pi 2 Model B Rev 1.1
Allstar Node 481482
Dashboard http://gm4slv.plus.com:42112/

This one is to use for tests and experiments….

FIXME

John Pumford-Green 05/06/25 22:30 BST

Further Information

public/radio/2025/allstar_expands.1749227009.txt.gz · Last modified: by john